For those who once thought social media was just for the basement bloggers and those newfangled e-retailers, sit on this stat for a second: B2B marketers (we’re talking the top five Fortune 500 companies) spent $11 million on social marketing in 2009, and that number is set to increase by 491 percent, to $54 million, in 2014.

According to a new study from the University of Massachusetts’ Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, four of the top five Fortune 500 companies “consistently post on their Twitter accounts.” And of those 500 companies, the industry with the most Tweets? None other than insurance companies! Those representing the insurance category include Allstate and Liberty Mutual Insurance Group, among others. The insurance category even beat out food production and consumer products industry for the total number of Twitter accounts, such as McDonald’s and Walgreens.

Even more interesting, the companies ranking in the top 100 of the Fortune 500s were the most likely to be active Twitterers than those in the lower rankings.

The numbers demonstrate an undeniably explosive growth in the social media world for B2B corporations, and a generous tilt in marketing budgets towards the social side. As mobile and social media marketing trends continue to climb, the only question that remains is “who’s next?”

In November of 2009, Catchfire Media officially launched with a soiree at Jasper Winery. During the event we projected a presentation built on the Prezi platform and received several positive comments on the look and feel of the presentation. Since November, Prezi has gained much acclaim; several presenters at the World Economic Forum in Davos used the platform, and it recently won the European Seal of E-Excellence Award at CeBIT.

So much has changed in social media in the past five months—platforms continue to grow exponentially and social media use is skyrocketing—that we wanted to share a new, updated Prezi with you.

Some of my favorite statistics from the new presentation:

• When a tsunami threatened Hawaii’s coast, followers of #HItsunami on Twitter received updates faster than cable news channels could provide them.
• Since its founding in 2006, more than 75 million accounts have been created on Twitter (though a majority of these aren’t creating content).
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect, and more than 60 million Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.
• LinkedIn has more than 60 million users and is adding one new user every second.
• Facebook garners more unique visitors than any site online other than Google.
• 100 million Facebook users check updates on their mobile phones every day. These users are 50% more active than people who only access Facebook on a computer.

Following is the new Prezi. Let us know what you think of it!

(RSS subscribers, please view this post on the blog to see the embedded presentation)

Do you know who you should be talking to through your blog, Facebook Page, Twitter account, or any other social media platform? As with any form of communications, your social media strategy relies on knowing your audience.

“Shut up and listen”

Author and journalist Bob Garfield told attendees of last year’s PRSA International Conference to “shut up and listen.” With tools available as rudimentary as Google Alerts, it is possible to discover conversations already taking place about your organization. That is certainly a start. In many situations it’s critical to address conversations already taking place about your business; however, this is not where the search for your audience should end. You are not using social media to its full potential if you view it solely as a reactionary device.

Where you should be looking

So where do you find your audience? Well, that depends on who they are. Audiences could include customers of a specific demographic, shareholders, board members, employees, voters, etc. Once you have some targets in mind, zero in on where they hang out. Shareholders might be discussing your company on a forum, while passionate brand advocates may be discussing you in a Facebook group. You either need to make a serious commitment to discovering these “hang outs” or hire someone to do it for you.

Put your strategy to good use

Now that you have found and targeted your audience, implement your strategy. Though let’s be honest here, there are a few important parts I am leaving out—like what that strategy entails—but we’ve covered that before. The point of this post is that you need to know your audience in order to have any hope of connecting to them.

Who are your most important audiences? How do they prefer to receive information? Are they excited to hear from you? If so, how do they show it?

[Photo from tore_urnes on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

Keeping in tradition, I will continue to address mistakes being made by well-run organizations in relation to their brands’ social media presence.

Another common mistake I see is that some business leaders and marketing teams have the tendency to come off as phony or insincere when trying to engage consumers via social media. Without forethought and strategic planning, your organization’s social media efforts can come off as counterfeit, or even worse—spam-like.

If you draw just one thing from this post, please consider this: in the grand spectrum of traditional marketing and consumer relations, social media is simply a different way to communicate with your customers. Social media is about engagement and relationship building. There’s no need to “disguise” yourself on the web—you’re representing your brand, and thanks to the transparency associated with the social web, you have the unique ability to say exactly what you want.

For example, Ford Motor Company has a Twitter account run by Scott Monty and Gwen Peake of Digital Communications (via their listed bio). After each @ reply, retweet, and general comment, one of the two Ford employees signs off using their initials: either “^SM” or “^GP.” In addition, Scott and Gwen’s personal Twitter handles are listed on the corporate page. Now you tell me, which would you feel more comfortable interacting with, Scott Monty or “Ford?” Would you feel better about directing your questions to Gwen Peake or “Ford?” Odds are, you would prefer the human-to-human relationship over trying to question the Ford Empire as a whole.

Social media is meant to be transparent. You would be doing a great disservice to your organization to treat it otherwise.

Don’t be phony with your fans, but also don’t stress over how to develop an authentic voice. Our experienced team of analysts develop listening and communicative strategies every day, so give us a call or shoot us an email—we’re here to help.

[Photo from Mykl Roventine on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

It was only a matter of time: the world’s largest search engine, Google, announced its partnership Wednesday with the world’s largest social network, Facebook, to include Page updates in the search results. Now, the company that currently controls 90 percent of the search engine market will not only be able to pull in information related to 50 million tweets per day sent out on Twitter, they’ll also have semi-VIP access to the nearly three million fan Pages on Facebook.

Although Google first announced the Facebook-search inclusion in December—along with handful of other social networking platforms like Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Identi.ca—we have yet to see results related to the Pages.

Many may mouth the word “monopoly,” but consider this: Microsoft’s Bing.com search engine has exclusive access to pull in content from Facebook’s 400 million users. Simply put, Google gets Facebook Page update access; Bing gets Facebook User update access. Who really has it better?

Do you really want every bit of content from Facebook’s 400 million users—borderline inappropriate photos, “LOLs,” and “♥s” included—pulled into your search engine? According to Facebook, “Pages are for organizations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner.” This is not to say every page maintains the described “official, professional” tone, but this is the standard.

Will Bing pull ahead in search engine market share with its unprecedented Facebook user access, or will this capability hurt them in the long run? Will Google’s search results seem inferior in comparison? You tell me. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

[Photo from luc on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

The blogosphere and its broad scope of consultants have given way to new ideas about measuring social media ROI (return on investment). Some call it return on engagement, while others say thinking about ROI as the risk of ignoring is more important. No matter how you slice it, organizations are not going to engage in social media if they can’t prove that the time (and money) spent is producing results.

And yet, even if this long-understood acronym didn’t have a trail of new interpretations following it around, professionals utilizing social media aren’t paying attention to it anyway. According to a study from Mzinga and Babson Executive Education performed in 2009, 84 percent of professionals reported they do not measure the return on investment for social media.

Make it easy to measure social media ROI

If someone tells you that social media’s ROI cannot be measured, they’ve got it all wrong. Although the inputs for making an ROI calculation may not be as obvious as they are in other situations, the pieces still exist.

For those that haven’t worked with ROI before, put simply, it seeks to determine how the sum of all your inputs (investment) compares to your total outputs (return).

If you have a staff member using social media on your company’s behalf, the investment you’ve made is in the salary for that employee and the time they spend. Your return is what the company realizes as a result of that employee’s time spent using social media. If starting a company blog to discuss your manufacturing process generates leads and a few new clients, you can determine the return on what you’ve invested in social media.

Set goals to measure your success

While other situations may not be as simple as the one described above, setting goals and objectives for your efforts in social media will help you make sense of how things are paying off. It may be hard for you to assign a monetary value to conversations taking place about your company, but if your goal is to increase those conversations and the positive sentiment associated with them, that is something you can measure with a variety of analysis tools.

Determine your own acceptable returns

Outside of tracking dollars directly invested into social media programs and the results they produce (new clients, products sold, sign-ups received), a lot of the discussion around ROI can be determined by what is acceptable to you and your team. If increasing sign-ups to your newsletter by 1,000 percent is worth the time or cost (investment) associated with growing that list, then that return (the new sign-ups)  is positive.

Measuring social media ROI doesn’t always have to be about numbers or revenue. Determine what is important to your business, and then use that in your calculations. If social media can help you achieve your goals and produce a successful return on what you’ve invested, why wouldn’t you give it a try?

What are the most common questions you hear about calculating social media ROI? How do you combat these notions to prove the value of social media?

[Photo from net_efekt on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

Online metrics firm Compete.com announced on Wednesday that a monumental shift has taken place in the online world: Facebook has taken over Yahoo as the number two most popular site in the U.S., as measured by unique visitors. While Google overtook Yahoo two years ago for the number one spot, Yahoo’s 132 million unique monthly visitors are nothing to dismiss. Looking at the chart provided by Compete.com, you can see that Facebook experienced a giant growth spurt between February and July of last year.

From Facebook’s perspective, a larger network equals more advertising dollars. From a marketer’s perspective, audience targeting is further strengthened as the Facebook network expands.

The second bit of information gleaned from Compete.com is a game changer. Their research found that 11.6% of all time that Americans spent on the internet was on Facebook. The chart below shows that this number is on the rise as well. This news is more important than who is number two because it shows that social media is growing in societal influence.

Looking at Alexa’s top 100 U.S. websites provides an even more interesting look at social media’s relevancy. Depending on how you define a social media site, most of the top 15 sites are either purely social media-focused or tilt heavily in that direction. From our point of view, this means one thing: defining a social media strategy for your organization should be one of the most important considerations when you review your overall communications plans.

As evidence continues to roll in that your customers are spending considerable amounts of time on social networks, will you shift money from traditional advertising to social media engagement? What market signals will be the turning point for you and your organization?

Similar to PepsiCo’s “Refresh Everything” project, Snack Alliance, the maker of riceworks® Gourmet Brown Rice Crisps launched a social media campaign of its own in mid-December meant to fund honorable establishments and efforts. Their campaign, “Show Us Your Goodness,” is backed by $60,000 in donations, inviting consumers to nominate and vote for the nonprofit organization or charitable cause they find most inspiring.

A worthy idea? Of course. Could improvements be made? I believe so.

Let’s begin with the company itself—how many of you have heard of riceworks®? There’s no fault in launching an admirable charity campaign, but when you’re starting from the bottom, up, you cannot rely on social media alone to get the word out. It’s one thing to begin with a globally-known company such as PepsiCo and launch this kind of campaign, but even Pepsi exceeds expectations, exhausting marketing efforts in all but their annual Super Bowl commercial. This is not to say that riceworks® has completely abandoned traditional media; however, I haven’t heard the heavy-hitting radio ads or seen the commercials, as I have for Pepsi’s Refresh Project. The only way we heard about riceworks’ initiative was through a Help a Reporter Out ad . . .

Riceworks’ campaign offering is no $20 million, but that’s not to say it goes without notice. Nonprofits rely on these generous donations, and there’s no short supply of them needing help. A few questions remain though: do these campaigns cheapen the gesture by flaunting their product? Is this just a new way for companies to reap rewards from shelling out dollars they would have donated anyway?

I’m still trying to sort out all the implications myself, so I’ll rely on your comments to guide. Are you part of a nonprofit organization, and if so, how do you feel about these campaigns? Have you applied for any such grants, or do you plan on it?

In my local Hy-Vee store earlier this week, I passed a small display of brownies and bars in the bakery section. The pumpkin bars looked amazing, and I was charmed by the brand, “Kate & Nola’s Confections.” I noticed a placard at the back of the display that described the history behind the brand name, noting Kate and Nola as the wives of the founders of Hy-Vee.

The brand is openly and entirely devoted to these two women, their fondness for baked goods, and the compelling roles they played in the history of Hy-Vee, Inc. I’m a sucker for a good story, and needless to say, I bought both the “Spectacular Pumpkin” and the “Chunky Chocolate Fudge” bars.

With social media, your company’s story is already being told, regardless of your participation. Consumers are sharing their experiences about your brand, products, and services with each other online. As we’ve said before, it’s how you interact with and work to shape that story, along with your consumers, that will define your success in this space (and win customers).

Talk About Your People

Sometimes, that’s all it takes. Reminding consumers about the human elements of your brand is an easy way to immediately connect with them.

Hyundai’s “Body Pass” Super Bowl commercial was a perfect example of this. Here, Hyundai is not telling the story of its cars, but of its people—3,300 quality experts in Montgomery, Alabama, to be exact. This commercial elicits a sense of community, trust, and appreciation, which all trump (hands down) the impression of a fast car.

The story that backed “Kate & Nola’s Confections” was full with nostalgia, admiration, and respect for two women dear to the Hy-Vee brand. These companies succeeded in capturing my attention because they sought to connect with me at a deeper level—past the product or service, directly with their history and people.

Wear Your Heart On Your Sleeve

Both of the companies above pulled at some heart strings to achieve a memorable experience. Don’t be afraid to get a little excited or sentimental in telling your story. Your passion will only add to the ultimately deep, emotional connection your brand is making with the consumer.

Being honest, up front, and setting clear expectations are no-fail ways to ensure consumers your company is trustworthy. Consumers expect transparency and immediacy on the web—from finding company contact information quickly and easily on your site, to knowing what kind of response they might get (and when) from posting a question to your company’s Facebook Page.

What’s your favorite example of a company presence online and why? What stories do they share about their company that you find compelling?

Yesterday morning Google held a press conference to announce their latest effort in the social communication space. With a live YouTube broadcast and hundreds live blogging or tweeting about the event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and a team of Googlers announced the launch of Google Buzz.

(Watch this Google Buzz video on YouTube)

In Sergey’s own words, “This is another very compelling evolution. I think you have the meeting of social communication and productivity.” While others call Buzz “FriendFeed reincarnated” or a “Twitter killer,” we simply see it as another communication tool with which you need to become familiar.

Learning the basics of Buzz

On the surface Buzz looks like another status update tool, not unlike Twitter or Facebook. Though the key is in its deployment (within the Gmail inbox), and its tight integration with other Google services like Google Maps, Google Reader, and Google Profiles.

Users can access Buzz from within their Gmail inbox, as well as on a mobile device. If you have a Gmail account, you (should) have access to Google Buzz. The fact that there is no additional sign up process will be a big benefit to scaling up users.

When someone posts a Buzz from their phone or their browser, they are presented with the option to make the post public or private. If public, the Buzz will be indexed within Google’s real-time search immediately—a space previously only occupied by tweets per the recent Google-Twitter deal. If the user marks a post as private, only friends will be able to see what was posted.

For more details about the inner workings of Google Buzz, see the Official Gmail Blog or the Buzz section of Gmail Help.

Building on the back of the original social network: email

The impact of Google Buzz being built on top of Gmail is best summed up by a blog post from Jeremiah Owyang shared in July of last year, citing that email is the first—and largest—social network. Social networking has jumped to the fourth most popular activity online, now surpassing personal email, but there are still millions that may inch into becoming more social with a tool like Buzz living inside their inbox.

Making good things better

When it comes to sharing rich media, Google has made Buzz a shining star. Photos can easily be shared inline, and importing pictures from Picasa or Flickr is a breeze. Users can also connect their Twitter account, allowing all tweets to be visible by Buzz contacts.

The attention to privacy settings Google has implemented from the beginning is a good sign. Google realizes that much to Mark Zuckerberg’s dismay, not everyone is ready to share everything with everyone. The simple public/private selector makes it clear who will see your Buzzes.

Creating more problems

Greater connectivity and integration between our social profiles is a welcome benefit, but it has also led to some interesting headaches for Buzz users. As people begin connecting each of their accounts to Buzz, contacts are feeling overwhelmed by all of the information flowing through. When once you would only see someone’s tweets, now you are seeing everything they do within Google Reader, Flickr, Twitter, Blogger, and so on. Without some sort of a content filter (something FriendFeed was famous for), this overload of data will become a serious problem very fast.

The impact on the enterprise

If you’re thinking that Google Buzz only affects consumers, you’ve got to think again. The Google Enterprise team announced yesterday that Google Buzz will be available to businesses using Google Apps within a few months. In addition to that release, there will also be additional features specifically for users sharing within an organization. This could replace existing social collaboration tools like Yammer, especially if your office is already relying on Google to handle business email.

Outside of the enterprise, there’s also the case of real-time search results. Katie recently discussed how real-time updates can impact the way visitors discover information about your business, and the addition of public Buzzes to these real-time updates will only increase the amount of information available.

Our team is excited to watch how Google Buzz evolves and to evaluate its usability as part of an overall social media strategy. With the backing of Google and potentially millions of users gaining access to the service overnight, it’s likely safe to say that Buzz is here to stay.

What do you think is most exciting about Google Buzz? How do you see this fitting into your existing flow of social communication?